When Pirooz Kalayez from SanghaFilms asked us to help him raise money to fund his next indie movie, based on the contemporary novella ‘Shoplifting from American Apparel‘, it would be our way to gain some karma-kudos. The stars aligned quite right too: we LOVE cinema, the celebrated source-material by Tao Lin for the film shows us the life as it actually happens right NOW and around us (it’s very much about internet) and the whole project is small and independent, just like we are ourselves. Based on the tree-character for the movie, designed by comic artist Jeffrey Brown, we designed the easy-to-build paperkit to make up a bit for all the paper we’ve used the past years.

So, this paperkit is still for free, we only ask of you to investigate this movie-project (FB, Twitter) and if you like the whole idea to help Pirooz and his crew to actually make it happen. If you donate only $20 (or more!) you become a shoplifting Swami (which is a big deal!), feel established as a movie co-producer and get the paperkit, a schmancy unique T-shirt, the movie poster, the soundtrack of the movie AND ‘thank you’-credits IN the movie.  Wow, all this for about the same amount as parking your car for 4 hours here in Amsterdam.

Let’s do this! and show the world internet does make dreams come true. Maybe, if they get enough money, they might even have a little cameo for Brad Pitt, or Megan Fox! I surely hope so  

Reason for this joyful event is the launch of the much-anticipated book ‘Papertoy Monsters’, curated by Brian Castleforte and published by Workman, already topping the list of children’s craftbooks worldwide. Obviously, we contributed to this book with two monsters: Grimp and Zwart, so get your copy before it’s totally out of stock.

Mind you: these are monster-sketches (duh!). In Papertoy Monsters, all the 50 (!) colourful monsters are printed on both sides of the sheet, pre-cut and pre-folded, so you only need to pop them out of the book to glue them together. It will not get easier for you. Ever.

We all know owls are one of the wisest creatures and this one certainly will be one day too. Thing is: she’s still very young and inexperienced, but she compensates that with a passion for reading thick books while you sleep. It don’t hurt to have her posted in your bedroom since owls hunt for little scary creatures by inborn instinct. She will watch over you.
Happy dreams everyone

(click one of the images to download Howie)

Collect them all! and adopt my chicken-brothers and -sisters too:
Owly, Otus, Hoothoot!, Red, Tunkuruchu, Shelbey, Lowly, Orly, Sophia, Brady, Octavia, Bubblegum, Charlie
This photo shows them all >>> click!

Edit: Thank you for all the lovely blog-title suggestions in the comment-box. We’ll go with Lling’s suggestion, so we would like to thank her in particular. We’ve adopted some names too out of humble appreciation for all your thoughts. 

Now let’s send some pictures of one of the owls and share how you are taking care of them. We would love to see the birds migrate all over the globe and will post the best ones in our Flickr-pool.

-Darla from delicious Bakingdom created 3 Harry Potter-themed owls here for downloading.

Last year was kind of hectic, so we decided to prepare ourselves better for 2011. With this friendly table-calendar we will know what kind of weekday our birthdays will be. And how many weeks we still have to wait for it. Next whole year we will be a little bit smarter and a tiny less lonely with a new paper girlfriend from around the world every month. Wow, let’s get downloading it!

Happy New Year to everybody!

Long long time ago Mike Wohlwend from Egg Up had this idea to have paper-artists join forces in a visionary, massive collaborative paper project. 3Eyedbear and no-less than Shin Tanaka were invited to kick off a series where heads and bodies of paper characters were meant to be designed separately to mix and match between different designs. A good idea, better than the plan to have it all be featured in a printed magazine. Long story short: trees have been saved and now the project finally is launched online.

Go get them tigers!

Update:
EggUp didn’t last long unfortunately. It’s a shame interesting projects like this little off-beat magazine are not allowed the time to blossom fully. One day I hope someone with patience WILL crack the code. Art in combination with philosophy is interesting enough to deserve a chance.